Whitney McVeigh's work focuses on the psychological and physical aspects that underlie and define us as humans. Concerned with reinvention, she uses found objects, including books and old ledgers and creates large paintings embodying a sense of time and human imprint. Her work explores both collective memory and alludes to the layering of time.

Over a twenty-year period McVeigh has amassed a collection of found objects weighted by their unique patternations; tracing former lives and the once tangible relationship an individual may have had with the object. The artist acts as custodian of these ‘markers’. She isolates yet elevates the materials, entrusting them to reflect and spur philosophical understandings of history, time and memory. McVeigh's paintings are precoccupied with the complexity and dual layers of the body and form languages with origins in Eastern and Western philosophy.

McVeigh has travelled extensively to carry out her practice and has held residencies in Mexico, India, China and more recently at the Nirox Foundation in South Africa. She is a Fellow in Creative Practice at University of the Arts, London and has exhibited and lectured internationally including solo exhibitons at Eykyn Maclean Gallery, New York (2018),Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (2016), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2015) and David Kruth Projects, NY (2011). Her participations to group exhibitions include Plato in L.A.: Contemporary Artists' Visions, Getty Villa, Los Angeles (2018),The New Book of Knowledge, Metamatic-Taf, Athens (2016) moving image Light Switch for Extinction Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery (2014) and Glass Stress, White Light/White Heat at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). In 2009 she worked in film on a trip to Syria where she recorded Sight of Memory, exhibited Icastica Biennale, Arezzo (2013) and in 2012 she travelled to Kyrgyzstan with the BBC to research and direct two short films about artists for televsion. McVeigh attended Louise Bourgeois' salon in New York (2007) where she gave a short presentation of her work.

The art critic and historian Simon Schama wrote about McVeigh's film 'Birth': Origins at the end of life "The result is an extraordinary poignant, and profound exercise in exposing a piece of the human condition that can escape us, imprisoned as we are in the trivial imperatives of daily life.The voices are each distinctive but all have a kind of poetic power to their utterances. The film is at once simple and complex, delicate and rugged; quick and steady; a finely concentrated work of real art."

McVeigh's research at University of the Arts, London (LCF) Human Fabric looks at the human being as a vessel and carrier of stories and memories and through site specific projects, alludes to the layering of time and collective memory.